[Dr. Scott Stern] said the growing wealth of medical knowledge doctors are expected to use and apply “is just mind-boggling and impossible to keep in your head. It’s clear that we have to do this better to deliver the kind of care that patients assume they are getting, and that they probably are often not getting.”

Reference apps for physicians are nice; they compose the largest number of physician-centric apps currently on the market. However, we need productivity apps for doctors. Why is there no great electronic prescribing app? Why don’t EMR vendors have simple apps for order entry?

I’m waiting for the day when I can walk into a patient’s hospital room, talk to them, examine them, discuss treatment options, then pull out my phone (PHONE, not tablet or going to a computer) and hit a few buttons to add new orders for the patient. I won’t have to enter login information and wait for the computer. I won’t have to enter the patient’s name; it will already know which patient’s room I’m in through RFID (and will have the consequent benefit of reducing errors). For the most common orders, it will only require a few taps. And it all of this has to be faster than a Google search.